Karen Mason’s recording, Chistmas! Christmas! Christmas!, is probably the one CD I have to play every holiday season. Mason is famous for the tradition of a live show, and this wraps up amazing humor, heart and singing into one glorious gift package. And before Mason, I never knew that We Three Kings was a torch song or an eleven-o’clock number!

LaMott combines her melted-chocolate sound with a great mix of standards and then-new material. I don’t understand why more people don’t do the holiday lyric to Stay With Me, and the unexpected medley of I Saw Three Ships and Bring a Torch Jeanette Isabella combines two holiday songs that I never really understood into a lovely coherent package.

Marcovicci delivers a selection of holiday classics informed by Shelly Markham’s terrific big band-flavored arrangments. My favorite selection here is Blue Champagne with a 3am on New Year’s Day feel.

Callaway’s jazz-infused vocals give a peppery dash to the holiday season. In addition to an amazing vocal to Carol of the Bells, the CD features two terrific songs penned by Callaway, This Christmas and God Bless My Family (joined by her sister Liz Callaway).

Cook delivers fairly standard fare with her standardly excellent vocals and lovely, lovely Wally Harper orchestrations. The really amazing moment on this CD is a gospel-tinged version of He’s Got The Whole World in His Hands accompanied by banjo and harmonica that feels like one is visiting a small Georgia church on Christmas Eve. (Interestingly, I prefer the Cabaret Christmas version of her singing White Christmas accompanied only by Wally Harper on piano over the lushly orchestrated version on this CD.)

It always amazes me that one of top director/coaches in the world of cabaret, who guides her charges into amazing interpretations of Gershwin, Porter, Berlin, et. al., is at heart a Southern-rocker singer/songwriter.*

Lina Koutrakos’s new CD, The Low Country, showcases the artist as the full, expressive force-of-nature that she is. Performances on the CD present her as questioner, priestess, emotional audience, and comforter of acute insight, intelligence and heart.** All the material has been penned by Koutrakos, who clearly supports her strengths as a performer and human with a story to tell.

One of the things Ron and I always say about cabaret is that it is hard to really “get” a performer without seeing them As a special bonus, this CD comes with a DVD with an interview with Koutrakos and clips of her doing a couple of the numbers.

The NYTimes on the pair appearing at Birdland: “Midway through “Winter Wonderland,” the amiable new holiday show that Christine Ebersole and Billy Stritch brought to Birdland on Wednesday evening, the madcap nightingale locked inside Ms. Ebersole stole out of its cage. That exotic bird has a high soprano with a spinning vibrato that is one part gramophone voice and two parts light operatic ingénue; its sound is beautiful and weird.”

When I’m at Trudi Mann’s Fabulous Open Mic for Singers, performers regularly appear there when they have NY gigs forthcoming. And they always mention the show while they’re up, and they always have promo materials to distribute. And this goes for some heavy-hitters such as Marilyn Maye, Karen Obermiller, and Barb Jungr.

I recently saw a couple of people with a forthcoming show performing to a room of people they didn’t know. There was no distribution of cards. Even worse, if one didn’t know the performers, one would have no idea what their individual names were.

A lot of people shy away from “self promotion.” But in the end, I feel that this does a disservice to the artist, the audience, and the genre. If an audience is interested in your work, they deserve the easiest possible avenue of getting more information about it ! (Because we are doing work that people want to see more of, aren’t we?) If an artist doesn’t attact their rightful audience, then that really does a disservice to the artist’s work. And if artists and audiences do not connect, cabaret will really be a dead duck!

And another marketing tip: I felt so sorry for an artist whose postcard I received in the mail the other day. She had taken a great deal of effort to write a personal note at the bottom of the card. (I had no clue who she was, and she was New York-based, so obviously she was mailing extensively.) However the post office’s zip code sticker made her handwritten message illegible. Always do a test mailing to yourself of your postcard!

John Miller is a pre-eminent musical contractor in New York as well as a freelance bassist. He was also Tony nominated as part of the band in I Love My Wife. This CD has him presenting music from the theater in a variety of contemporary pop styles.

As an excercise, I think this recording is fascinating and adept. Classics from the Broadway songbook are given arrangements that would befit artists as varied as Jimmy Buffet, Willie Nelson, or Elvis Costello. The musicianship is superb. And on each track one feels the sense of what Miller is trying to accomplish.

Still, the whole venture left me incredibly cold. I can’t say that after listening to this CD I got any more of a sense of Miller than a very capable musician/singer who can adapt material to a lot of styles. It would be good as the background for a dinner party, though.

I hope everyone has a wonderful Turkey Day, and that everyone indeed does have much to be thankful for!

Note to songwriters, there really aren’t any obvious Thanksgivcing songs out there except Over the River… (and no one in this household can even remember the song past the first 8 bars without going to Wikipedia). So here’s the next best thing, John Bucchino’s song Grateful as sung by the talented Michael Vitaly Sazonov*

I always say that the Shelly Markham/Judith Viorst song,”The Sweetest of Nights,” is the perfect “occasion” song. Here’s a version I find oddly moving. And , as always, I wish my loyal “tens of readers” the sweetest of nights and the finest of days!

*In a video made by a friend that Ron and I are grateful to have in our lives — the lovely and not-celebrating-Thanksgiving-today-because-she’s-living-in-Toronto-with-her-husband

I just got back from seeing Next to Normal at Arena Stage , and I’m on the horns of a dilemma. According to the Washington Post, the creative team behind this mounting of the show is taking their work seriously and using time in front of an audience to re-tool the show. As such, they’ve requested that critics not view the show until mid-December.

I certainly don’t want to give Chad Bauman, the very diligent Communications Manager at Arena, another situation that he feels he needs to manage. However, I did pay for a ticket and have some notions to share, so I’ll try to limit my discussion accordingly.

The show is a fascinating portrayal of a woman with mental illness trying to cope and find her way out of the mire. It has a six person ensemble doing protean work, led by the amazing Alice Ripley. After having adored the song in her Kennedy Center concert earlier this season, it was thrilling to seeing Ripley sing I Miss the Mountains in the context of the show (clip of the song). And cabaret singers, especially under-40 female belters who want something contemporary with an edge, should be mining this score for material!

Ron, who isn’t on my Arena subscription, came with me tonight due to the Arena Stage $25 ticket sale. He was seated in row B on the side and said that he couldn’t see most of the action that happened on the second and third level of the stage. I was in row F in the center and had a great view. As this is a problem that I don’t see being resolved no matter how many changes the creative team makes, people who payed full price and are seated close, be warned — you might want to change your seat.* And speaking of Arena’s ticket sale, I was a little surprised to see the number of empty seats that remained in the house, presumably due to the combination of Tuesday night and Thanksgiving week. (According to today’s Post, Arena sold 6,661 tix during the sale.)

*In the one item of the show that I pray gets re-thought, people in the center section, rows B through D, seem to be getting an eyeful of the leading lady’s nether areas while she’s sitting in a chair in an above-the-knee, A-line skirt. Or was it the costume department trying to viscerally demonstrate her vulnerability?